Harmonix sets ‘Blitz’ to new beat

Friday, August 31, 2012 -- Anonymous (not verified)

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Arts & Culture

Friday, August 31, 2012

Author(s):

Garrett Martin

Don’t worry, “Rock Band” fans. Harmonix hasn’t forgotten you. The Cambridge-based developers’ “Dance Central” series might hog the spotlight, but the long--standing weekly release of new downloadable “Rock Band” tracks has never abated.- Now, for the first time since the release of “Rock Band 3” in 2010, there’s a new game under the “Rock Band” title. You won’t even have to dig that plastic drum kit out of the basement to play it.

“Rock Band Blitz” marks Harmonix’s return to the traditional video game controller. It plays like the com-pany’s early beat-match games “Frequency” and “Amp-litude,” those pre-“Guitar Hero” cult favorites that asked you to mash controller buttons to the beat of pop songs. In “Blitz,” there are four or five separate lanes per song, depending on whether it requires a keyboard part. Each lane is filled with the colored gems familiar from “Rock Band,” spaced out to match the beats, notes and words of the songs. You jump from lane to lane tapping the controller’s buttons or analog joysticks in time with the music, trying to build up your score multiplier through perfect hits and a -variety of useful and interactive -power-ups. It can’t match the semi-realistic thrill of playing these songs on a plastic guitar, but there’s still a musical feel to how the game translates the songs.

Harmonix acknowledges the limited musicality of “Blitz” by prioritizing the scoring system. It emphasizes both your leaderboard rank for song and, more impressively, online “score wars” with friends, where you try to rack up the highest score on a certain song in asynchronous one-on-one duels. There’s no simul-taneous multiplayer, which is regrettable, but the score wars will keep you coming back to “Blitz.”

The 25 new songs in “Blitz” are all playable in “Rock Band 3,” and every “Rock Band” song you’ve previously downloaded can be played in “Blitz.” I played through all the new songs in less than three hours and spent most of that time looking forward to playing them in “Rock Band 3.” “Blitz” got me to put that “Rock Band 3” disc back into the Xbox for the first time in almost a year and convinced my wife to pick up the microphone again. It even drove me to buy new downloadable songs.

“Blitz” might be a lightweight riff on the core “Rock Band” experience, but as a stopgap promotional tool for the franchise, it hits the right notes.